The Weekly Blog

In Rwanda, Lewin ’05 makes a Princeton connection

From the “small world” department, PAW recently received a message and photo from Connie Lewin ’05, the director of strategic partnerships and global marketing at Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), a New York City-based organization that promotes market-based solutions to problems in the developing world.

SHE is working to locally produce and distribute sanitary menstrual pads that use banana fiber as the absorbent core, and Lewin traveled to Rwanda, the first country in the initiative. While there, she met Donata, pictured at right, who happened to be wearing a Princeton sweatshirt. “When I told her that I graduated from there,” Lewin wrote, “she was so excited and said that she would like to go there too!”

Lewin compared the experience to the title anecdote from The Blue Sweater, a book by nonprofit leader Jacqueline Novogratz in which she describes meeting a young boy in Africa who was wearing the same sweater that she’d donated to a clothing drive years earlier. “This was my [blue sweater] moment,” Lewin said.